There are two ways to work with me. Business owners get a single engagement covering the bookkeeping, the financial statements, the tax strategy for the company and for you personally, and every return that comes out of it. Individuals get two planning sessions a year and the return that follows from them.
What’s constant is that there is no filing-only option. A return I first see in March is one I can only report, not improve. That isn’t the work I want to be doing for someone.
Business engagements run twelve months, billed monthly. The individual engagement is annual and can be paid either way. Fees are fixed for the term and reviewed together before each renewal. If your books need catch-up work before we can start clean, that’s quoted separately and charged once.
If something material changes mid-year (a new entity, a second state, an acquisition), I’ll tell you before any additional fee is incurred. You will never get a surprise invoice from me.
Every tier includes the whole picture: books, financials, strategy, and returns for both the business and the owner. What changes between them is how complex your situation is and how often we're in the numbers together. These are starting points, not brackets; see how I set fees below.
The owner-operator. One entity, one state, generally under $1M in revenue. You’re the business, and your personal return is inseparable from it.
The business with a team. Roughly $1M–$5M in revenue, people on payroll, and decisions where the wrong call costs real money.
The CFO seat. Multiple entities, a holding structure, real estate alongside the operating business, or a transaction on the horizon.
If your situation is personal rather than a company (equity comp, rentals, K-1s from someone else's business, a retirement or Roth question, a liquidity event coming), there's a smaller version of the same idea. Two conversations a year, and the return falls out of them.
For individuals and households who want the decisions made deliberately instead of discovered at filing time. Not available if you own the business. Owner planning is inseparable from the entity, so that's the engagement above.
Then the return. Federal and your state, prepared in the spring as the result of those two conversations rather than as a discovery exercise. Estimates set up if you need them.
And access in between. The “should I do this?” questions are the whole point. Ask them when they come up, not in April.
$1,500 fits a straightforward household. Rentals, K-1s, equity comp, multiple states, or a trust move it up. You'll have the number in writing before I start.
Nobody's business is shaped like a pricing table. The numbers above are where most engagements land, not a set of containers I need you to fit into. These are what I actually ask about on the first call, because they're what drives the work.
One operating company is straightforward. An operating company, a holding entity, and a property LLC is a different engagement.
Every bank and card account is a reconciliation. Fifty transactions a month and five thousand are not the same job.
Whether payroll runs in-house or through a provider, and how many states you're collecting and remitting in.
Each additional state means apportionment, another return, and another set of rules to keep straight.
Rentals, K-1s from other ventures, equity comp, and investment activity all live on the return I'm already filing for you.
Clean books coming in start on day one. Books needing catch-up get a separate one-time cleanup quote before the engagement begins.
A business two years in doesn’t have the same needs as one at $4M, and pricing it as though it does helps nobody. If you’re building something and the numbers aren’t there yet, we start below these figures and step up as the work does.
That step-up gets written into the engagement at the start, so a growing fee is something we already agreed on rather than an awkward conversation a year from now. I’d rather grow with a few people than price them out at the beginning.
You can’t hire me to just prepare a return. Not a 1040 on its own, and not a business return where I haven’t seen the books. It isn’t a pricing decision. A return I first see in March is one I can only report, not improve, and reporting isn’t worth either of our time.
Both engagements above put the planning first for exactly that reason. If you’re somewhere genuinely in between, say so and we’ll figure out what fits.
Two kinds of work sit outside the ongoing engagements entirely. Both are project-based, most of it comes to me from attorneys, and both are scoped and quoted per matter after we talk through the facts.
Fraud examinations, internal investigations, fund tracing, economic-damages analysis, and expert-witness engagements. Work attorneys bring me when they need an accountant who can find what happened and then explain it clearly to people who aren’t accountants.
Independent valuations for buy/sell transactions, gift and estate planning, and litigation support. Pairs naturally with the forensic work when a dispute needs both the number and the story behind it.
I take on a deliberately small number of clients, because the whole point is that you get a partner rather than a vendor. Tell me a little about your business and I’ll come back with a clear, written fee.
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